Disoriented chiral condensate formation from tubes of hot quark plasma

Abstract

We investigate the time evolution of a system of quarks interacting with \ensuremath{\sigma} and pion fields starting from an initial configuration consisting of a tube of hot quark plasma undergoing a boost-invariant longitudinal expansion. We work within the framework of the linear sigma model using classical transport equations for the quarks coupled to the mean-field equations for the meson fields. In certain cases we find strong amplifications of any initial pion fields. For large-radius tubes, starting from quark densities that are very close to critical, we find that a disoriented chiral condensate can form in the center of the tube. Eventually the collapse of the tube drives this state back to the true vacuum. This process converts the disoriented condensate, dominated by long-wavelength pion modes, into a coherent excitation of the pion field that includes significant components with transverse momenta of around 400 MeV. In contrast, for narrow tubes or larger initial temperatures, amplification occurs only via the pion-laser-like mechanism found previously for spherical systems. In addition, we find that explicit chiral symmetry breaking significantly suppresses the formation of disoriented condensates.